I’ll admit to be quite shallow and buying books because I like the jacket, sometimes the blurb will put me off, other times not. A jacket with a good title? Pretty much a given.

I saw a copy of Rowena Macdonald’s “Smoked meat” face up on the display table in a book shop (yes, another admittance of shallowness, no shelf browsing for me), and was immediately tempted.

A series of interconnected stories, think the way Robert Altman threaded together Raymond Carver’s stories for “Short Cuts”. The first features a nude life drawing model, reading the author biography it turns out that Rowena Macdonald drew on experience, having modelled herself.

As humans we see patterns where none exist, but that has never stopped me from acting from our mind’s compulsion to see order in the flux. Ostensively my “Novelists” series is loosely corralled around documenting the so called “off beat” scene, as labelled by 3AM magazine. Reading signs like tasseomancy, it turns out they’ve interviewed her.

Rowena, once convinced that I wasn’t requiring her to pose naked kindly agreed to have her portrait taken. And here it is.

She also thinks “Another girl, another planet” is the greatest pop song written. A fact I could only argue with if you claimed “Teenage kicks” was.

The greatest dishonour the Hollywood studio system has brought us is making the writer unsung. Once storytellers were revered as magi, lore keepers. In a culture where fame equates to a face’s screen-time, some portraiture to rebalance the wordsmith as hero.